Is There a Place for Oral History in State Archives? Experience, Current Status, Prospects

Over the past decades, oral history has become a firm part of Ukrainian humanities. Hundreds of researchers, ranging from schoolchildren to highly qualified professionals, have recorded thousands of interviews.

What is the fate of most of them? They are stored either in the makeshift archives of academic institutions or in the archives of private institutions, and most are kept at the homes of researchers. This situation raises the question of the potential duration of preservation of the collected materials, and most importantly, their accessibility to a wide range of researchers.

In Ukraine, the most reliable way to legally transfer oral histories to the status of cultural heritage is to transfer such materials to state archives for storage. During the Urban seminar, we will consider the following questions: does such experience really exist in state archives? And also, what does a researcher need to do in order to have the collected materials accepted for permanent storage in state archives?

Urban Seminar will be held in a workshop format. Researchers are invited to discuss scholarly projects, research at various stages of development, and completed research that is being prepared for publication.

Participation in the Urban Seminar requires preliminary reading and discussion of the researcher's text. If you would like to join the Seminar, please email Maryana Mazurak (m.mazurak@lvivcenter.org), and we will send you the materials in advance.

The event will take place as part of the public program "Source as a Choice" organized by the Center for Urban History in partnership with Documenting Ukraine / IWM and Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation.  

During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.

Credits

Cover Image: Facebook page of the Central State Electronic Archives of Ukraine